Reading Notes #612

In this week’s Reading Notes, we explore cloud debugging, .NET Aspire, and more. Join us for insights, workshops, and podcasts covering a range of exciting topics! 🚀

 
Sharing my Reading Notes is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

 

Cloud

• GalaSoft Laurent Bugnion (Laurent Bugnion) - Nice post debugging investigating a bug, that cannot be reproduce locally only in the cloud.... But with the right tools it's much easier.

Programming

• Let's Learn .NET Aspire - Start your cloud-native journey live! - .NET Blog (James Montemagno) - The .NET Aspire workshop is been deliver in many languages and available online. To learn what it is, when should we use it and how it works, join a live session or watch it on demand.

• Exploring docker compose watch in Visual Studio Code (Julie Lerman) - That looks fantastic! And thanks to Julia we will avoid a few gotchas.

• Simplify Your .NET Aspire Caching With Metalama (Metalama Team) - 2 great tools in synergy make the result so much better. This nice post is good to get us started on caching.

• Join Us for .NET Aspire Developers Day – Elevate Your Cloud Native Skills! - .NET Blog (Mehul Harry) - July 23 - Check the date there will be a .NET Aspire event with more advanced stuff like building custom components and more.

• Why and How to Execute GraphQL Queries in .NET (Frank Boucher) - Shameless plug... Did you know GraphQL could improve the performance of your application by avoiding over fetching?

• Apprendre .NET Aspire en français (Frank Boucher) - Another shameless plug for French content this time. I did a 1h45 long video where I explain the basic of .NET Aspire by doing a workshop and providing details.

Podcasts

• Martin Hinshelwood: Migration Azure DevOps Server to the Cloud - Episode 302 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - Interesting episode about migrations and how to approach them. Because so many stories start by a migration.
• GitHub Evolving with Damian Brady (.NET Rocks!) - Great episode to learn all things GitHub... and these days that mean a lot.
• 416: Going Light + How Spatial Video Really Works (Merge Conflict) - Great episode. Is going with two phone is going light however? Hhmmmm...
• Episode 287: Why You As A Developer Must Care About Managing Your APIs (Web Rush) - The 1M questions episode! Answers are optional because the fun is about being curious... right?
• Mitch Denny: .NET Aspire Architecture - Episode 304 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - Learn more about .NET Aspire what it is, because yes it's hard to explain, and what's the road map.
• How to finally have that dreaded conversation (Modern Mentor) - Yes it's hard, but pause, and do those talks.

Miscellaneous

• What is platform engineering? (Julia Kulla-Mader, Chuck Lantz) - Platform engineering is gaining in popularity, but what ibis really. This article gives a good explanation to start our learning journey.

Reading Notes #611

Welcome to this week’s edition of Reading Notes! In this roundup, we explore a variety of topics across cloud, programming, databases, and AI. From understanding Docker’s USER instruction to styling Blazor components with CSS, I’ve got you covered. Let’s dive in!

Suggestion of the week

• Understanding the Docker USER Instruction (Jay Schmidt) - A great post to that explains really clearly the basic usage of user when building our container. After reading this post you should feel confident to follow this best practices.

Cloud

• Azure Static Web Apps–SWA CLI behind the scenes (Bart Wullems) - Cool post to that quickly explains how the CLIworks and a few different tools.

Programming

• Blazor Basics: Styling Blazor Components with CSS (Claudio Bernasconi) - That will solve an issue I was having... Blazor for the win!

• Is Your ASP.NET Core Application Running In A Container? (Adam Storr) - Very neat tip to know when the App is or not in a container.

• Setting up NGINX load balancer for .NET WebApi (Oskar Dudycz) - Very well done tutorial to set a reverse proxy.

Databases

• Automating SQL Deployments using GitHub Actions - Part 2 (Eduardo Pivaral) - That's pretty neat. Of course, there is a SQL option but I never thought about it. Excellent idea to keep everything in one place with versions.

AI

• Updated Documentation for Semantic Kernel (Sophia Lagerkrans-Pandey) - Nice update in the documentation, new content new look.

~frank

Reading Notes #610

Happy Canada Day!
It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

You also read something you liked? Share it!

Cloud

• Is .NET Aspire NuGet for Cloud Service Dependencies? (Phil Haack) - I like the comparison with NuGet. Using .NET Aspire in a project does indeed simplify a lot things. I'll be waiting for that follow up post.

Programming

• Dev Home Preview v0.15 Release (Kayla Cinnamon) - Cools news updates in Dev home.

• Announcing TypeScript 5.5 - TypeScript (Daniel Rosenwasser) - Really good news for the JavaScript developers. This post shares all the new features like ECMAScript, Set Methods support, and the performance improvement included in this release candidate of Typescript.

• Refactor your code with default lambda parameters - .NET Blog (David Pine) - A really good post, last of a series of four about new features of C# 12. I really like that new way to declare defaults I think it's much clearer.

• Blazor Basics: Dealing with Complex State Scenarios (Claudio Bernasconi) - Interesting package Fluxor that help managing states. The post also explains different pros and cons of methods to maintain states.

Databases

• What is SQL Injection in Cybersecurity? How to Prevent SQLi Attacks (Jen Swisher) - This post explains what are SQL injections and how they could affect our website. When I shares how to prevent those attack the post focuses on CMS like WordPress.

AI

• Mistral Introduces AI Code Generation Model Codestral (Daniel Dominguez) - On nice! A new model that specializes into code, and many languages on top of that.

~frank

Reading Notes #609

It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

You also read something you liked? Share it!

   

Cloud

• It's Finally Possible To Hibernate Azure VMs (Sam Cogan) - This new feature must be such a relief for all the VM users. Make sure to read this post to know the requirements of the VM tone able to hibernate it.

• Enhancing Performance in Azure Container Apps (Cary Chai) - This post gives us an history of the different algorithm used in ACA but also explains briefly how does one works.

Programming

• Visual Studio 2022 - 17.10 Performance Enhancements - Visual Studio Blog (Ashok Kamath) - Impressive improvement going up to 50% in specific cases! Congratulations to the team,event the smaller speed improvement will be feel.

• Setting up NGINX load balancer for .NET WebApi (Oskar Dudycz) - Very well done tutorial to set a reverse proxy.

• What's new for the Microsoft Fluent UI Blazor library 4.8 (Vincent Baaij) - awesome update just before summer! (well, in the north hemisphere).

AI

• Using Phi-3 & C# with ONNX for text and vision samples - .NET Blog (Bruno Capuano) - Nice post that shows that when using great tools it can be really simple todo amazing things.

• I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity - ChatGPT and other tools have an impact and it disturb the flow. Some embraces the change other don't like the change. Interesting post where the author shares his concerns.

~frank

Reading Notes #608

It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

You also read something you liked? Share it!

Cloud

• Running a Playwright scheduled job with Azure Container Apps (Anthony Chu) - A very nice post about recording test session using azure container app. Good idea!

Programming

• The .NET MAUI Extension for Visual Studio Code is now Generally Available - .NET Blog (Maddy Montaquila) - Wow,already GA! Looking forward to try it on my Linux PC. This post shares all the features packed in this release, and there videos too.

• Introducing collection expressions in C#12: Behind the scenes of collection expressions - Part 1 (Andrew Lock) - First post of a series that goes deeper into c# comparing expressions, initialization, and what the compiler does.

• Making C# Simple with Fluent Techniques (Niraj Ranasinghe) - Nice post. I didn't realise that Fluent path was used in so many places. It makes it so cleaner when we can use it.

AI

• Visual Studio Code AI Toolkit: Run LLMs locally (Shreyan Fernandes) - It goes so fast! It used to be complicated to get AI and now we can get one locally directly from vs code... Quick post to get us started.

• Announcing the official OpenAI library for .NET - .NET Blog (.NET Team) - Yay! New version of the SDK.

Podcast

• 84. Comparing Terraform, Pulumi and Bicep: Infrastructure as code - with Sam Cogan (Betatalks the podcast) - Create episode with Sam. Really interesting to listen about those three IaC.

• Dan Garfield: GitOps with Kubernetes - Episode 298 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - Interesting episode about containers and deploying platforms, tools and so much more.

• Episode 1900 with Scott Hanselman! (.NET Rocks!) - Three of my favorite people in the word in a single episode! It was such a pleasure to listen pleasure to listen talk about all those little stories. Long live to .NET Rocks (and HanselMinutes)

Miscellaneous

• What's new in the Windows Subsystem for Linux in May 2024 (Craig Loewen) - Tons of experimental features are being move to regular ones, and more are coming up to manage our distro, improve security and more.

• 8 Learning Paths for Beginners on GitHub (Cynthia Zanoni) - Wow! so many very cool learning Path to get started with anything you can think about it. I may do one or two just to refresh my knowledge.

~ Frank

Reading Notes #607

It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

You also read something you liked? Share it!

Cloud

• Azure PostgreSQL, Entra ID Authentication and .NET | LINQ to Fail (Aaron Powell) - Great post! Of course using some identity provider is more complicated then a strait password, but it's way simpler that we may though.

• Bringing the Aspire dashboard to ACA (Mark Downie) - One of the great tool that was released with Aspire is its dashboard as it shows traces across services. This post shares how to enable this amazing tool in Azure.

• Microsoft Entra ID Tenant Starters Guide: Understanding Identity Management and Licensing (Gregor Wohlfarter) - Nice post to have an overview of this important piece of security.

Programming

• Refactor your code using alias any type - .NET Blog (David Pine) - Excellent series to learn more about recently to feature of C#.

• Blazor Basics: Child Routes & Optional Route Parameters (Claudio Bernasconi) - You know your route 101 and would like to learn more, this post is for you.

Databases

• A beginner's guide to mapping arrays in EF Core 8 - .NET Blog (Arthur Vickers) - An interesting post to that depending if your database supported features explains how EF Core could works and use arrays.

Podcasts

• The Definition of Success with author Neil Strauss (A Bit of Optimism) - For a conversation to be constructive and to learn from it not all participant needs to agree. Nice episode about success.

• 81. From APIs to natural language: The democratization of AI - with Henk Boelman (Betatalks the podcast) - Nice to listen to a colleague. Henk definitely knows the very well the topic and how to explains it clearly.

• Motivated by play (Friends) (The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source) - What a journey! Interesting episode, inspiring.

• Brady Gaster: .NET Cloud Native - Episode 295 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - Aspire, aspire, aspire, you will learn all about Aspire in this episode.

~frank

Reading Notes #606

It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

You also read something you liked? Share it!

Cloud

Azure Developer CLI (azd) – Build 2024 Recap (Grace Kulin) - All developers should look at how it can really speedup and simplify your Azure deployment and ease the creation of your infrastructure as code file (bicep and terraform).

Programming

Catch Up on Microsoft Build 2024: Essential Sessions for .NET Developers (James Montemagno) - Perfect for . NET developers who would like to know what's new and what's coming

Avoiding interactivity with Blazor? (Jon Hilton) - Nice post that examines how some fancy checkbox or button interactivity works in Blazor.

Must-have resources for new .NET Aspire developers (Anthony Simmon) - This post contains a list of other posts and videos about aspired really interesting if you want to get started.

Microsoft Dev Box introduces new ready-to-code and enterprise management capabilities - Wonderful powerful device where and when you need it. This post shares the most recent new features.

Developing cloud-native apps with .NET Aspire and Visual Studio (Mark Downie) - Nice post that celebrates the general availability of .NET Aspire and shares many advantages of using it with Visual Studio.

It turns out, it's not difficult to remove all passwords from our Docker Compose files (Frank Boucher) - We all did it. Hardcoding password in code, because it's "just" a quick thing, or it's just for us, and we think it's okay... but is it? This post shares my learning while removing passwords from docker-compose file.

AI

Announcing the AI Toolkit for Visual Studio Code (John Lam) - Nice! The favorite editor of so many now have an AI extension! I missed the Microsoft Build sessions with the demos. Lucky me they are available on demand!

~frank

Reading Notes #605

It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

You also read something you liked? Share it!

Cloud

• Logic App Consumption: How to set an API connection to use Logic Apps Managed Identity inside Visual Studio 2019 (Sandro Pereira) - I love those true life story where the author shares how they solved a real-life problem.

• Use Azure DevOps Pipelines as a Serverless Compute Engine (Chris Pietschmann) - Do you know or use Azure DevOps Pipeline? They can read your code from most source repository and will execute tasks for you. Like CI-CD as explains in this post.

Programming

• Reimagining Pong Wars with C# and MVUX (Uno Team) - This is a very interesting post that details all the architecture and code of this game.

• How to Check Your Docker Installation: Docker Desktop vs. Docker Engine (Jay Schmidt) - A very instructive and useful post that list all details related to Docker Desktop and Docker Engine for Mac, Linux, and Windows platform.

• Empowering Developers at Microsoft Build: Docker Unveils Integrations and Sessions (Vanessa Fournier) - Nice post. You should definitely watched the Build session where they show how to target multiple platforms, and many new features

• Docker Compose Profiles, one the most useful and underrated features (Oskar Dudycz) - Woah! For now on, I shall have a profile in all my docker compose file. We'll probably not all, but I'm definitely using them. This post is the perfect place to get started and understand what are profile and how to use it.

• General Availability of .NET Aspire: Simplifying .NET Cloud-Native Development (Damian Edwards) - Fantastic news! It an amazing tools that simplify local development and give us the opportunity to see what is happening.

• 5 easy tips to improve your personal website performance ( Salma Alam-Naylor) - I accept the challenge, I will review my websites to see how I can improve the performance. Interesting post that shares many great ideas.

AI

• A Quick Guide to Containerizing Llamafile with Docker for AI Applications (Sophia Parafina, Marc Sherwood) - Great post tht goes over how to put our favorite AI model in a container to work locally.

~Frank

Reading Notes #604

It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

You also read something you liked? Share it!

 

Cloud

• Azure Communication Services May 2024 Feature Updates (Daysha Carter) - Wow many great new features in this update.

• Logic App Consumption: How to set an API connection to use Logic Apps Managed Identity inside Visual Studio 2019 – SANDRO PEREIRA BIZTALK BLOG (Sandro Pereira) - I love those true life story where the author shares how they solved a real-life problems.

Programming

• Blazor Basics: 9 Best Practices for Building Blazor Web Apps (Claudio Bernasconi) - This post shares best practices. They are simple to follow but very impactful.

• Performant, Secure, and Versatile Containers (Savannah Ostrowski,Sohan Maheshwar) - Cool! It's time to try it, only one switch to flip..

• An introduction to primary constructors in C#12 (Andrew Lock) - Wow! This post dig into what can and cannot do the new constructors in C#. Example by example trying more complex scenarios, fascinating!

DevOps

• Use Azure DevOps Pipelines as a Serverless Compute Engine (Chris Pietschmann) - Do you know or use Azure DevOps Pipeline? They can read your code from most source repository and will execute tasks for you. Like CI-CD as explains in this post.

Miscellaneous

• Introducing Plans on Microsoft Learn (Kaberi Bell) - Would it be to be a data engineer, AI specialist, app builder there's a plan for you and that's a very cool new feature on learn have a look this blog post explain all of it

• How Do You Measure Developer Experience? (Jennifer Riggins) - An interesting article about what and how measure performance. I didn't know so many system and details concepts were that detailed.

• Windows Terminal Preview 1.21 Release (Christopher Nguyen) - Tons of new features again and I love| seeing all those community contributions.

~Frank

Reading Notes #603

It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

Having interesting content? Share it!

Cloud

• Logic App Consumption: How to set an API connection to use Logic Apps Managed Identity inside Visual Studio 2019 (Sandro Pereira) - I love those true life story where the author shares how they solved a real life problem.

• Using keyless authentication with Azure OpenAI (Pamela Fox) - Great post to improve the security and best practices in our code.

Programming

• Refactor your code with C# collection expressions (David Pine) - Nice post about best practices but also to really understand how things works.

• Secure your container build and publish with .NET 8 (Richard Lander) - Nice post that shows that it's easier than you probably think to improve the security in your containers.

• 🚨 7 Most Common Mistakes in C# Programming 🙅‍♂️ (Konstantin Fedorov) - Good tips to keep our code efficient and stable.

Podcasts

• Glenn Condron: .NET Web Development - Episode 293 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - Nice episode about evolution of .NET, it's open source side today, Azure Developer CLI, the new Aspire and so much more.
• Think Faster, Talk Smarter with Matt Abrahams (Modern Mentor) - Interesting episode about how to become a better communicators in both formal and informal situations. Matt is the author a book on that topic.
• Portainer for Kubernetes, Docker, Swarm, Edge, and IoT (DevOps and Docker Talk: Cloud Native Interviews and Tooling) - Great episode about Portainer a tool that most (if not all) of us should use.

Miscellaneous

• DevOps Adoption for IT Managers (Chris Pietschmann) - Interesting post that shares the benefits of DevOps for your enterprise and how to approach it as a manager.

• Cascadia Code 2404.23 (Christopher Nguyen) - I used to do ASCII art back on my C=64... Now that all those new fonts and symbols are added should I start again? Nice to have all the options available to be able to display everything we need|the console.

~Frank

Reading Notes #602

It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

Having interesting content? Share it!

Cloud

• Azure SDK Release (April 2024) (Hector Norzagaray) - Lots of SDKs updates for many different languages and services.

Programming

• .NET Aspire preview 6 - .NET Aspire - The more a play with Aspire the more I like it. .NET developers you must give it a try.

• How to upload a file with Blazor SSR in .NET 8? - (Jon Hilton) A nice quick tutorial with all the code snippets we need.

• What's new for the Microsoft Fluent UI Blazor library 4.7 - (Vincent Baaij) A lots o new features and improvements in this release.

• Why don’t we talk about minifying CSS anymore? - (Salma Alam-Naylor) An interesting post. I didn't think about it but it's true, we used to talk way more about minification...

• Minimal APIs Nuget Packages - (Shawn Wildermuth) Same great tools but new names to make it easier to remember and more of the same family.

AI

• #SemanticKernel: Local LLMs Unleashed on #RaspberryPi 5 - (Bruno Capuano) This is the perfect tutorial to get started with local AI. No powerful computer required.

~Frank

Reading Notes #601

It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

Having interesting content? Share it! 

Suggestion of the week

• Announcing: Azure Developers (Mehul Harry) - Looking forward to this event. I have the pleasure to present a session with Jerry Nixon about Data API Builder. Join us!

Cloud

• Demystifying Azure CLI pagnination (Jeremy Li) - That's great! It's so sad when all the information is "throw" on us without any control and it's on us to find our "needle" we are looking for in those screens full of line. This will definitely helps.

Programming

• Blazor Basics: Localization Using Resource Files (Claudio Bernasconi) - A nice and complete tutorial.

• What's new for .NET in Ubuntu 24.04 - .NET Blog (Richard Lander) - This is a good news! Definitely going in the right direction.

• Minimal APIs Nuget Packages (Shawn Wildermuth) - Same great tools but new names to make it easier to remember and more of the same family.

• Useful features in Entity Framework Core 8 for your application (Dennis Frühauff) - A great post with detailed explanation and code samples that covers the major new feature and enhancements of EF8.

• Better Minimal APIs Endpoint Organization With Carter in ASP.NET Core (Ivan Gechev) - Carter looks like a very useful library definitely something to explore a bit more.

• Warp’s Team plan for developer productivity is available today (Melanie Crissey) - I started using this terminal a few weeks ago on a personal device. It's interesting to see all the different options an the possibilities for teams.

Open Source

• Open sourcing MS-DOS 4.0 - Microsoft Open Source Blog (Scott Hanselman, Jeff Wilcox) - That a cool news! I'm curious what people will do with it, what kind of experiments they will try.

~ Frank

Reading Notes #600

It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

Having interesting content? Share it! 

by: Microsoft Designer

Suggestion of the week

• Streamline your container build and publish with .NET 8 - .NET Blog (Richard Lander) - As containers takes more and more space in our development life, it's great to see the tools evolving too. This post is a must for all .Net developers.

Cloud

• Announcing a new login experience with Azure PowerShell and Azure CLI (Damien Caro) - This is a great news. Have a look before you update.

Programming

• Build & test resilient apps in .NET with Dev Proxy - .NET Blog (Waldek Mastykarz) - Every web developers needs that tool. Dev Proxy is just pure gold.

• C#: What is the difference between 'string' and System.String? (Chris Pietschmann) - Memory check passed .... Did you knew?

• Blazor Basics: Handling Images Dynamically (Claudio Bernasconi) - A nice simple tutorial playing with images within Blazor.

Miscellaneous

• What is an RDP Browser? (And How To Get One) (Peter) - A great alternative when you want to test on different browser or version of a browser, for gaming, And also for cyber security when investigating.

~Frank

Reading Notes #599

It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, close to 600 weeks ago in fact, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

Having interesting content? Share it!

    

Cloud

• Configure Azure Functions to use Identity Based Connections (Mark Heath) - this is a great post that explains really well in detail how to migrate from using a connection string to using identity from the infrastructure to the code

Programming

• Self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi cluster (Savannah Ostrowski) - Super cool post that explains how she did it. It make me want to have a PI cluster too!

• Syncing a git branch between Windows and WSL filesystems (Andrew Lock) - It's true that by habit or reflex most people will think of Git as centralized... But it's not! Once you understand that so many possibilities are available. This post both summarize that and shows and example.

Low Code

• Testing Your Native AOT Applications - .NET Blog (Marco Rossignoli, Jakub Jareš, Jakub Chocholowicz) - With code ahead-of-time (AOT) we still need tests but how to do it with that stripped version. of .NET? This short tutorial shows how.

Podcasts

• Richard Lander: Containerization and Linux - Episode 289 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - Really interesting episode about the progress and the current state of .NET.

• Modular Monoliths in .NET with Steve Smith (.NET Rocks!) - In this era of micro services it's not often that someone talk about monoliths, but maybe we should.

Miscellaneous

• How to automate tasks in Windows (David Nield) - Seeing things getting done by some automation you built is a nice feelingThis short post introduces 4 tools that will get you started with automation.

~Frank

How to Deploy a .NET isolated Azure Function using Zip Deploy in One-Click

In this post, I will share a few things that we need our attention when deploying a .NET isolated Azure Function from GitHub to Azure using the Zip Deploy method. This method is great for fast deployment and when your artefacts are zipped in a package.

Note The complete code for this post is available on GitHub

Understanding Zip Push/Zip Deploy

Zip Push allows us to deploy a compressed package, such as a zip file, directly to Azure. It could be part of a continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI-CD) or like in this example it could replace it. This approach is particularly useful when you want to ensure your artifacts remain unchanged across different environments or when aiming for the fastest deployment experience for users.

While CI-CD is excellent for keeping your code up-to-date, zip deployment offers the advantage of speed and consistency. It eliminates the need for compilation, leading to quicker uploads and deployments.

Preparing Your Package

It’s crucial to package with all necessary dependencies the code required. There is no operation to fetch any external packages during the deployment, the zip file will be decompressed and that's it. The best way to ensure you have everything you need is to publish your code, to a folder and then go in that folder and zip all the files.

dotnet publish -c Release -o ./out

Don't zip the folder, it won't work as expected.

You need to go inside the folder and select all the files and zip them to create your deployment artefact.

The next step is to make your artefact available online. There are many ways, but for this post we are using GitHub Realease. From the GitHub repository, create a new release, upload the zipped file created earlier and publish it. Note the URL of zipped files from the release.

Preparing The ARM Template

For this one-click deployment, we need an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template. This is a document that describes the resources that we want to deploy to Azure. To deploy the zipped file into the Azure Function there are two particularities that required our attention.

Here the sections of the template.

[...]
"resources": [
    {
        "apiVersion": "2022-03-01",
        "name": "[variables('funcAppName')]",
        "type": "Microsoft.Web/sites",
        "kind": "functionapp",
        "location": "[resourceGroup().location]",
        "properties": {
            "name": "[variables('funcAppName')]",
            "siteConfig": {
                "appSettings": [
                    {
                        "name": "FUNCTIONS_WORKER_RUNTIME",
                        "value": "dotnet-isolated"
                    },
                    {
                        "name": "WEBSITE_RUN_FROM_PACKAGE",
                        "value": "1"
                    },
                    [...]

Here we define an Windows Azure Function and the WEBSITE_RUN_FROM_PACKAGE needs to be set to 1. The WEBSITE_RUN_FROM_PACKAGE is the key that tells Azure to use the zip file as the deployment artefact.

Then to specify where the zip file is located we need to add an extension to the Azure Function.

    {
      "type": "Microsoft.Web/sites/extensions",
      "apiVersion": "2021-02-01",
      "name": "[format('{0}/ZipDeploy', variables('funcAppName'))]",
      "properties": {
        "packageUri": "https://github.com/FBoucher/ZipDeploy-AzFunc/releases/download/v1/ZipDeploy-package-v1.zip",
        "appOffline": true
      },
      "dependsOn": [
        "[concat('Microsoft.Web/sites/', variables('funcAppName'))]"
      ]
    }

The packageUri property is the URL of the zipped file from the GitHub release. Note the dependsOn property that ensures the Azure Function is created before the extension is added. The complete ARM template is available in the GitHub repository.

One-click Deployment

When you have your artefact and the ARM template uploaded to your GitHub repository, you can create a one-click deployment button. This button will take the user to the Azure portal and pre-fill the deployment form with the information from the ARM template. Here is an example of the button for markdown.

[![Deploy to Azure](https://aka.ms/deploytoazurebutton)](https://portal.azure.com/#create/Microsoft.Template/uri/https%3A%2F%2Fraw.githubusercontent.com%2FFBoucher%2FZipDeploy-AzFunc%2Fmain%2Fdeployment%2Fazuredeploy.json)

The has three parts, the first is the image that will be displayed on the button, the second is the link to the Azure portal and the third is the URL of the ARM template. The URL of the ARM template is the raw URL of the file in the GitHub repository, and it needs to be URL encoded. The URL encoding can be done using a tool like URL Encode/Decode.

Final Thoughts

Zip deployment is a powerful tool in your Azure arsenal by itself of part of a more complex CI-CD pipeline. It's a great way to make it easier for people to deploy your solution in their Azure subscription without having to clone/ fork the repository.

Video version

If you prefer, there is also have a video version of this post.

References

• Zip deployment for Azure Functions
• MSDeploy VS. ZipDeploy
• Use a deployment button to deploy remote templates

Reading Notes #598

It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, close to 600 weeks ago in fact, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

If you think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• What is cloud native and how can it generate business value? (George Fitzmaurice) - Interesting thoughts about cloud native, how to see it, how to se it's value.

• Using Kudu in Azure to Debug an Azure Function (Paul Michaels) - Kudu is a fantastic tools that not enough people know about.

Programming

• Is Your Container Image Really Distroless? (Laurent Goderre) - Nice post that explains a new way to improve security and more while building our container by going distroless.

• Blazor Basics: Improved Performance with Component Virtualization (Claudio Bernasconi) - When applicable the lazy loading makes a huge difference. This simple tutorial explains how things works and has all the code to back it up.

• Azure PowerShell Tips and Tricks (Paul Harrison) - PowerShell is a very interesting and useful script language.All those tips are pure wisdom!

DevOps

• Beautiful .NET Test Reports Using GitHub Actions (Sean Killeen) - It's true that the unit test result in Azure DevOps looks amazing. Pretty nice adaptation in GitHub Action, could/ should it be native?

Open Source

• Linus Torvalds announces Linux 6.8 (Brian Fagioli) - Nice post.I feel we see more often distro new release making "the e news".

• Debian’s Dedication to Security: A Robust Foundation for Docker Developers (David Dooling) - Happy to see such a fundamental distribution take seriously security as core idea.

AI

• Building a Video Analysis and Transcription Chatbot with the GenAI Stack (David Cardozo) - This post explains a very cool project with generative AI and docker in different technology, very inspiring!

~Frank

Reading Notes #597

It is time to share new reading notes. It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

If you think you may have interesting content, share it!

Suggestion of the week

• Building Interactive Blazor Apps with WebAssembly (Ed Charbeneau) - Wow! A very well crafted tutorial that guides us, while explaining why we need to do what we're are doing at each steps.

Cloud

• Azure Spring Clean: Leveraging Azure Copilot To Better Manage Your Tenant (Sam Cogan) - It's always a good idea to do a tour of our resources in the cloud to see what's there. With that new AI assistant it will be easier to ask questions when we are not sure how to search.

Programming

• Blazor WebAssembly Virtual File System Access (Michael Washington) - A nice tutorial the show us how to keep file (aka data) in the browser of the visitor. All the code is available.

• ASP.NET Core Basics: Organize Projects—Architectural Patterns (Assis Zang) - Architecture helps us to have clear and easy to maintain code. And this is what is ready important. Besides that the code need to do what we want, obviously.

• Automate Your GitHub Workflow with Bash Scripting (arjun) - Remember, everything is scriptable...

• Blazor Render Mode – How To Avoid Dependency Injection Woes (Nick Cosentino) - Failing is learning. In this post the author shares why is Blazor app wasn't behaving as he expect and what he did to fix it.

Open Source

• My new open-source repository to schedule all your content! (Nevo David) - This post shares what look like a fantastic scheduling tool, I'll have to try this project definitely useful

Miscellaneous

• Starting CockroachDB in Single User Mode with a Dockerfile (Bryan Hogan) - I really believe that database in a container is the best option for many developers. Here a simple example with cockroachDB.

~frank

Reading Notes #596

It is time to share new reading notes. It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

If you think you may have interesting content, share it!

Suggestion of the week

• Introducing .NET Smart Components - AI-powered UI controls - .NET Blog (Daniel Roth) - Wait whaaat! This it so cool and useful and it's available now. You must see this the smart-past button needs to be on all forms...

Cloud

• Smart To-Do Creator: Combining the ease of Azure Logic Apps and the power of Generative AI (Gaurav Mantri) - A cool little project explained in this post. It uses logic apps and AI.

Programming

• .Net Aspire - A Brief Introduction (Paul Michaels) - I also started playing with aspire this weekend I must say I love it, give it a try.

• Difference Between await and Task.Wait in C# (Georgios Panagopoulos) - This nice post goes in the details to explains the difference of the two methods.

AI

• Microsoft and NVIDIA announce major integrations to accelerate generative AI for enterprises everywhere (Microsoft) - If you use AI or are planning to do it, this post will be interesting.

• Demystifying LLMS From Zero to Raccoon-Hero, with Azure and DotNet, Episode 1: Creating a CLI (Maho Pacheco) - This is a nice step by step tutorial that show us how to build a console application that use AI

• An Introduction to Mistral AI (Manish Shivanandhan) - An interesting aLternative to GPT when text is involved.

Miscellaneous

• Homo sapiens 1.0 (Mark Downie) - Interesting reflection about how to determine what ready important when adding features in a product or services.

~Frank

Reading Notes #595

It is time to share new reading notes. It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

 

If you think you may have interesting content, share it!

Programming

• .NET Aspire preview 4 - .NET Aspire - So much in this new release! So many possibilities.

• Generate Local .NET Secrets from Azure Deployments (Frank Boucher) - Nice new simple to get started.

• Unity extension for Visual Studio Code - Now Generally Available (Jb Evain) - That's an interesting idea! I'm not a Unity developer, but I'm curious to see the response from the community.

• Blazor Basics: Advanced Blazor Form Validation (Claudio Bernasconi) - Having control on the validation and how we guide our users is a must. This post does a great job at explaining how to to it within Blazor with clear and simple code sample.

• An introduction to the heap data structure and .NET's priority queue (Andrew Lock) - Great post that the explains how to understand the heap. This source of information could be so useful when investigating something that doesn't work as expected in our code.

• Lightweight In-Memory Message Bus Using .NET Channels (Milan Jovanović) - Messages queues are such a powerful tool when our solution work asynchronously. This nice tutorial shows us how to do it and stay local.

AI

• An Introduction to Mistral AI (https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/an-introduction-to-mistral-ai/) - An interesting alternative to GPT when text is involved.

• Get started with .NET 8 and AI using new quickstart tutorials (Jordan Matthiesen) - Five extremely simple example application to explain different AI scenarios in .NET and an opportunity to give your feedback.

Databases

• RavenDB and Two Factor Authentication (Oren Eini) - Good news! Always use the two factor authentication when available.

Miscellaneous

• This Is The Easiest Way To Make Your Life More Awesome - Barking Up The Wrong Tree (Eric Barker) - Love it! Don't be stuff buy time.... Nice post

~Frank

Reading Notes #594

It is time to share new reading notes. It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

If you think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Managing your Azure Resources with Deployment Stacks (John Kilmister) - That's a very useful tool, and nicely documented.

Programming

• Extract Method Refactoring Technique in C# – What You Need To Know (Nick Cosentino) - Great post that go over one of the most powerful method that every developers will be using all along their career. Simple and so useful, it's a must!

• Dapr v1.13 is now available (Dapr project maintainers) - I really like those post that goes over the news and also named all the contributors. This is when you see how many people are involved.

• Are Containers Only for Microservices? Myth Debunked (Zubair Aslam, Jay Schmidt) - Interesting post that demystify the myth about container by in only for micro services.

• Marten 7.0 is Released! (Jeremy D. Miller) - Nice update. Version 7 already...

• How to Fix CORS Error With AnyOrigin and AllowCredentials (Code Maze) - Anyone who work or build API go that error message about CORS. Here is a nice post to learn more about it and understand who we can fix it in an API.

AI

• RAG is Dead. Long Live RAG! (David Myriel) - Nice post that explains the differences between two type of AI RAG and LLM.

Databases

• Get Started with Milvus Vector DB in .NET - .NET Blog (Luis Quintanilla) - This post starts by explaining what's a vector databases and than show a nice example with movies.

~Frank